Manual installation

Minecraft for Windows

Minecraft for Mac OS X

Download Minecraft.zip. Unpack and place Minecraft in your /Applications folder.

Minecraft for Linux / Other

Download minecraft.jar. The jar is executable and might work as-is. If you run into memory issues, try launching it with java -Xmx1024M -Xms512M -cp minecraft.jar net.minecraft.LauncherFrame, also please use Sun’s JVM.

Multiplayer Server

If you’re running on Windows and just want to set up a server easily, download Minecraft_Server.exe and run it.

If you want to run the server on any other OS or without GUI it’s a bit more involved. First make sure you can use java from the command line. On Linux and Mac OS X this should already be set up but on Windows you might have to tinker with the PATH environment variable. Download and run minecraft_server.jar with java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M -jar minecraft_server.jar nogui.